Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
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The Tenth Month: How the Rig Veda Talks About Being Born
The Rig Veda uses the word for womb about seventy times and the word for embryo about a hundred, almost always to describe fire, dawn or the sky. In four short hymns it drops the metaphor and speaks about an actual woman in labour, and those verses are the plainest lines in the book.
Sweetness Before Sugar: Honey, Bees, and the Secret the Aśvins Stole
The Rigveda has no word for sugar. It has madhu, honey, roughly 250 times, and in four strange verses an actual bee shows up carrying a secret. Following that word leads to wild honey hunting, a severed horse's head, and a drink the Vedic poets may have lost.
Man Overboard: The Rig Veda's Shipwreck and the Sea That Should Not Be There
A man is abandoned in open water and carried home in a ship with a hundred oars. The Rig Veda tells this story in fourteen hymns, from a world with no coastline. What its poets actually knew about the sea turns out to be a harder question than either side of the old argument admits.
Carpentered Young Again: What the Rigveda Says When a Body Breaks
The Rigveda's poets describe damaged human bodies with the vocabulary of the workshop: fitted, fashioned, set flowing again. Behind that habit sits a fixed formula, the blind and the lame, that three different gods are credited with undoing.
A Hundred and Seven Homes: The Rigveda's Forgotten Physician
One Rigvedic poet lists his family: he writes verse, his mother grinds grain, his father is a doctor. Medicine is the trade the Rigveda almost never gets credit for, and the hymn that preserves it is one of the strangest things in the collection.